Imperial Bedrooms

by Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf; $24.95)

In this peculiar exercise in déjà vu, the joyless, dissolute teen-agers from Easton Ellis’s début, “Less Than Zero” (1985), resurface as joyless, dissolute adults. Once again, the narrator arrives in Los Angeles at Christmas, after four months elsewhere; attends parties where he inevitably runs into people he knew in high school, who despise or desire him (or both); gets drunk; gets stoned; and pities himself. In the earlier novel, he seemed at least vaguely troubled by his moral torpor, but there’s not a whisper of conscience here. The plot, involving a high-end prostitution ring and multiple murders, is incoherent, and the insights, such as they are (“Sadness: it’s everywhere”), fail to give resonance to the mounting horror. Still, few are as expert as Ellis at flaying the Hollywood scene, as when a starlet talks about “fasting and her yoga routine and how superstoked she is to be in a movie about human sacrifices.” ♦

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